Mees, kes teadis ussisõnu by Andrus Kivirähk

In this story, set during the Crusades, Põhja konn is an ally of the Estonians, having helped them to fight against the Christian invaders in the past. Põhja konn also features in Estonian author Andrus Kivirähk’s bestselling 2007 novel Mees, kes teadis ussis õnu, translated into English as The Man Who Spoke Snakish.

He travels around in giant leaps, devouring people and animals and desolating huge swathes of land, until he is finally defeated through a combination of bravery, magic, deceit and the ability to understand the language of the birds. In one of Kretuzwald’s collections, he is described as a monster with the body of ‘an enormous ox’, frog’s legs and ‘a chain-long tail of a snake’, his body ‘armoured with scales stronger than stone or iron’ (p. ‘Põhja konn’ (pronounced sort of like ‘puh-ya con’) has variously been translated as ‘The Nordic Dragon’, ‘The Dragon of the North’, ‘The Frog of the North’, and ‘The Northern Frog’. Tomingas, 1994.Īnother – perhaps more bizarre – statue is Tauno Kangro’s 2013 sculpture of Põhja konn, in an area of woodland on the outskirts of Viimsi. My normal walk from the apartment to the university takes me past an impressive statue of Estonian folklorist Jakob Hurt, while the city’s memorial to those who died in the War of Independence (1918–1920) depicts Kalevipoeg, the eponymous folk hero of Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald’s national epic.įolklorist Jakob Hurt in Tartu, slightly rain drenched. The Estonian Literary Museum in Tartu houses the extensive national Folklore Archives, and the Department of Folklore at Tartu University even has its own library. The country was independent between the two world wars and has been so again since it peacefully seceded from the USSR in 1991.Įstonia also has a rich and proud history of folklore.

The land of Estonia has at various times been controlled by foreign monarchs, Crusaders, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

I should clarify that, in the context of Estonia, ‘second largest’ does not necessarily mean ‘large’: Tartu has a population of around 90,000, similar to the Derbyshire town of Chesterfield. I am writing this blog post from a cosy apartment in Tartu, the second largest city in Estonia.

Mees, kes teadis ussisõnu by Andrus Kivirähk